Lindsey Vonn back on top after tumultuous year

By David Leon Moore, USA TODAY

Updated

Once she reached the mountaintop in her mountain sport, Lindsey Vonn won with such metronomic regularity and despite the injuries that buckle the best skiers from time to time that she began to seem like some kind of alpine robot.

By Fabrice Coffrini, AFP/Getty Images

Olympic champion Lindsey Vonn this week is pursuing Hermann Maier's record of 2,000 points in a World Cup season.

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It wasn't until last year — when she failed to win the World Cup overall title for the first time in four years, and later in the year filed for divorce and then reached out to rekindle a relationship with her estranged father — did we realize that she is fully human.

Human enough to end a four-year marriage that from a career standpoint was working beautifully but from a personal standpoint was failing. With her husband, Thomas Vonn, a former U.S. ski team racer, serving as her unofficial coach and manager, she won three consecutive World Cup overall titles and an Olympic gold medal, becoming the first American woman to win the Olympic downhill in the 2010 Vancouver Games. She won the race despite skiing with a painful shin bruise.

"We worked so well together, but I feel like ultimately that was one of our main problems," she said of her marriage in a phone interview with USA TODAY. "We were more about business and work than we were about having a relationship. He's a great guy, and I don't want to discredit anything we did together. We had a lot of success on the hill and off the hill. It just didn't work anymore as a marriage."

Human enough to reach out to her father, Alan Kildow, who had guided Lindsey into skiing in Minnesota when she was 2 and then moved the family to Vail, Colo., to advance Lindsey's junior career when she was 13. Kildow, who is divorced from Lindsey's mother, disapproved of Lindsey's relationship with Thomas from the beginning, largely because of the nine-year age difference.

Lindsey did not invite her father to her wedding in 2007 and hadn't spoken to him in more than six years when she picked up the phone late last year to tell him she was getting a divorce.

"I needed my dad to be there for me, and he was," says Vonn, 27. "We kind of just let the past be the past and moved forward. We're trying to build our relationship back again. It's definitely a slow process, but I'm really thankful for the support he's given me and for helping me through this.

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"It's been a tough time in my life. It was time to let go. Family is complicated, but family is always family. It was just time. I wanted my dad back."

Vonn proved herself

Amid the changes and the emotions, Vonn came full circle this winter, proving that she is not only fully human, but also dominant on the most demanding and fearsome ski courses in the world. On Friday, in winning a giant slalom race in Are, Sweden, Vonn clinched her fourth World Cup overall title, most of any American skier. Only Austrian Annemarie Moser-Proell has more World Cup women's overall titles with six.

This week at the World Cup finals in Schladming, Austria, she has a chance to top Hermann Maier's all-time record of 2,000 points in a World Cup season. Beyond that, Vonn in the coming years will chase Moser-Proell's all-time record of 62 World Cup victories. Vonn is third with 52. She also plans to defend her Olympic downhill title in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, where the women ran a downhill event this year. Vonn was third.

Vonn has won 11 races on the World Cup tour this season, matching the American record she set in 2010. Aside from winning the overall title, she has clinched season titles in downhill and super combined and could still win titles in super-G and giant slalom in Austria. Her current points total — 1,808 — is also an American record and puts her within range of Janica Kostelic's women's mark of 1,970 and Maier's 2,000.

Though Vonn has already clinched the overall, Maier's record is a good motivator this week. A win is worth 100 points. She will be favored in the downhill today and the super-G on Thursday. She is also capable of scoring in the slalom Friday and giant slalom Saturday.

"I'm going to fight in every race until the end," she says. "I've never really thought that 2,000 points was possible for me. This is an opportunity that may never happen again in my career."

As Vonn's feelings have bounced around this winter from sadness to triumph and eventually deep satisfaction, perhaps no one could empathize quite as much as her mother, who went through a divorce when Lindsey was a teenager and starting to make her name in the skiing world.

"I can testify that to go through what she's going through and still concentrate on what's in front of her is not easy," says Vonn's mother, Lindy Lund, who remarried last summer. "It's hard to put some things aside. But I had confidence in her. She has proven that nothing can stop her."

In winning back her title, Vonn, who somehow still struggles with self-esteem despite being the most accomplished skier in American history and one of the most high-profile female athletes in endorsement opportunities, has proved something to herself.

"Doing it on my own has given me more confidence than I've ever had," she says. "I felt like I had something to prove in so many ways. To try to get the title back. To prove I can do it by myself. I don't know how it looks to everyone watching, but I feel like it's definitely gone better than I expected. I proved my point, I think."

To those watching most closely, it has looked amazing. Not robotic, but stunningly great.

"Her season has been remarkable," says Jeff Fergus, a U.S. ski team coach who was selected to basically be Vonn's personal coach this season. "Her professionalism is unbelievable. No matter what the day is, what the weather is, whether it's skiing or off-the-hill stuff or working out, she's just non-stop. She is so driven."

Teammate Leanne Smith is in awe of Vonn's focus.

"She wants to win, and she wants to push herself to the top of her sport," Smith says. "That's her main focus. Whatever is going on around her, she has the ability to block it out. I'm sure she's had some low points emotionally, but she's going out there every day trying to win."

Teammates welcome her

While Vonn has the ability to block out nearly everything, she has also shown the ability — and the inclination — this year to join in. In the past, Vonn has been fairly isolated from the team, given her extensive sponsor and media demands and also that her husband served as a liaison between her and the U.S. coaching staff. At race sites, Lindsey and Thomas pretty much did their own thing.

At the Vancouver Games, there was tension between Vonn and U.S. teammate Julia Mancuso, who finished second to Vonn in the downhill. Mancuso was quoted on SI.com as saying U.S. skiers have a difficult time reaching their potential because of the attention placed on Vonn, who at the time responded, "I try to support Julia as much as I support all the other teammates."

The two patched things up quickly, and Mancuso said her comment had been blown out of proportion.

This year, in a way, Vonn joined the U.S. ski team all over again, and she liked it.

"I was never really with the girls," she says. "I've been kind of separated. Now I feel like I'm definitely more a part of the team. Everyone realizes it's been a really tough time for me. They've really gone out of their way to make sure I'm doing OK. I definitely appreciate it."

Vonn still has a full-time personal trainer, Martin Hager, and a physical therapist, Patrick Rottenhoffer. Both are paid by her primary sponsor, Red Bull. But she is more integrated into the team this year, whether it's communicating with the U.S. coaching staff or in just killing time with other skiers.

"She'll go to a movie with us, or just ask us what we're going to do," Smith says. "She just wants to hang out more. It gets lonely on the tour. Any teammate that's going through a hard time, we try to be there for her."

Fergus was impressed by the way Smith and others welcomed Vonn into the fold.

"Since this all came out, they have opened up and done whatever they can for Lindsey," he says. "Definitely they have been warm and welcoming. They could have shut the door and said, 'Sorry,' but it was the exact opposite."

They opened the door wide, and they became fast friends. But, as usual, Vonn was the fastest.